A socio-historical overview of the creativity–pathology connection: from antiquity to contemporary times1

Abstract

Writing around the turn of the middle of the twentieth century, the renowned literary critic Lionel Trilling (1945/1950, pp. 160–161) published an essay, “Art and neurosis,” in which he sought to expose as an insidious “myth” what he called “one of the characteristic notions of our culture,” the idea of an intimate connection between artistic creation and mental illness. However, like two noteworthy earlier critiques, Charles Lamb’s (1826) The sanity of true genius and George Bernard Shaw’s (1895/1909) The sanity of art , Trilling’s essay remains little more than a footnote in the rapidly expanding literature on the topic of creativity and psychopathology. Indeed, the belief in a close connection between genius or, more generally, creativity and illness has sprung ever deeper roots in the cultural fabric of Western society, a development that received new impetus from the weight of support from both clinical and non-clinical studies published over the course of the past three decades. Before then, few of the studies expounding a pathology position were focused on clinical diagnosis. Most of them, based primarily on biographical and anecdotal accounts of those viewed as geniuses, produced highly conjectural findings. However, starting in the 1980s, one witnesses the continuing use of historical sources regarding the eminent, in addition to clinical studies in the form of psychiatric and psychometric approaches. These clinical studies involved comparisons of living creative with living non-creative individuals. Notwithstanding dissenting views, the combined force of the most recent studies has led to something resembling a consensus, one that views the link between creativity and illness as a genuine, pervasive, and timeless phenomenon with decided biological roots that most often takes the form of manic-depressive illness or related types of mood disorders.

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